Drugged and dying, Bigby thinks about dreams. How, long ago, maybe two or three beers in, he told his roommate he wanted to be an umpire. He was going to drop out of school. He was going to spend years in places like Topeka or Huntsville, Des Moines if he got lucky, and, one day, he was going to be behind home plate in the World Series. He was going to wait until things got real high-leverage. Full count, runners on, etc. There was going to be a close pitch, and he was going to call it a nothing. He’d make a small noise. Put his arm one-tenth of the way up. He’d flinch, basically, and there wouldn’t be so much to it that it could be clearly labeled a strike. There’d be too much for it to be clearly called a ball. He told his roommate (poetically, he thought) that he was going to be “an absent God out there, and the cameras will catch the frenzy that ensues, the terrified chaos of attempted coping.”
Maybe it goes without saying that he never made it to the World Series. He never even dropped out of school. He did umpire as a side hustle (is that what they’d call it, these nurses with the dark hair and eyes so tired they seem authentically kind?). Weekend tournaments across the river in Davenport, or at that complex in the mud down on the Rock River, and one time he was behind the plate for a U-12 championship in Burlington. Late innings. Fifth or sixth, probably, and it’s tied at seven. Bases loaded. It’s a 2-2 count, and the pitch is outside, but by a margin even Major-League pitchers sometimes get (and without stopping the narrative of his thoughts there’s here a series of images and graphs, lines of all the text he’s read about the philosophy of the strike zone, about borders and particle physics and the many ocular biases, the barriers to definitive categorization), and Bigby goes into action. He has a whole complex array of thoughts, weighing pros and cons and thinking how at 3-2 the hitter might well swing, and so it’s now or never basically, isn’t it? It is. So, he does exactly what told his roommate he’d do.
The batter stares at him. The crowd starts to yell. The pitcher shrugs and then (with a touch of devious brilliance, one could argue) starts walking off the mound, trying to play it off like he heard the call loud and clear, and the base umpire comes jogging in.
“Hey, buddy, you alright?” he says.
But Bigby’s catatonic. Performing frozen. There is language everywhere. The three most common words are fuck, Jesus, and Blue, and the crowd is milling. Fathers are tapping their feet. Some of them are standing. Somebody’s going to run onto the field at any second, and a mother is wondering if maybe the umpire is having a heart attack, and he chooses that moment to turn and bolt away. He darts off like a deer or trout or something, and Bigby, he could always fucking run. He still could, he thinks. He could get up from this place and focus on every step until nothing worked anymore, until physical failure, and how far do you think he could get? He’s heard of people running a hundred miles at a shot. Younger people, though. In much better aerobic shape than he is now, but maybe back then he could have held his own. Darting to the parking lot. Driving away clad in full gear with the face mask and the chest protector, and, in the rear view, a few people giving futile chase. Kids kneeling, gloves on their heads. The base umpire trying to get in between punches and getting himself clocked, though maybe that’s an embellishment. Memory. Maybe it’s the morphine, and Bigby’s never told anybody about that day. He’s never gone back to Burlington, never even looked for notes in the newspaper or been tempted to check the internet. For him, it was enough just to do it, and now he’s watching it all unspool on loop in his mind, and it’s playing to an empty multiplex. The whole place has that cleaned-up butter smell. Dust in the projector. The film is silent, and the non-existent audience is nonetheless alive, and there must be bacteria in there waiting. Witnessing. Moths curl in the corners. Thoraxes rub against the floor. Bigby’s a disembodied eye, and in front of each fat recliner he sees these little collections of molecules. They float in the strobing light, these foggy ghosts, these piecemeal fossils of all our bated breath.
Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction,48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.
Lost Balloon 